‘Dracula’: The time-travelling vampire

Master creators Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss had cast a spell on us with Sherlock, the TV series starring Benedict Cumberbatch as the English detective created by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The version of Holmes recreated by Moffat and Gatiss came across as a brand new character that happened to share the name of the Conan Doyle creation.

Dracula, likewise, has been made to wear a new robe by Moffat and Gatiss in the eponymous three-episode miniseries. The undead count is as scary, powerful and brutal as he is expected to be. How he responds to modern times in the third episode is one of the most noticeable changes in him. Essayed superbly by the Danish actor Claes Bang, the character makes us watch it with awe - and some fear.

Old and haggard, Dracula is first shown in a dilapidated Transylvanian castle. As the story progresses, he crosses a water body and time-travels to reach the United Kingdom. His life has been one hell of a long journey. And he, as we know, cannot die.

Rules of the Beast, the first episode that reminds us of the Stoker novel often, starts by showing some clichéd horror movie tropes that don’t impress or scare us any longer. The face of the driver, who drops a lawyer named Jonathan Harker (John Heffernan) off at the castle, is half-covered by a piece of cloth. His eyes glow like blood-red neon lights. Bats flap their wings ominously in the middle of the night. As the viewer’s mind absorbs the initial visuals, the story unfolds.

After Harker arrives at the castle, he meets the count. What happens thereafter is revealed during an interview with Harker that’s conducted by an unusual Dutch nun, Sister Agatha Van Helsing (Dolly Wells). Harker, who was handsome when he had arrived at the castle, has mutated into a preternaturally white-skinned man who has lost his hair to alopecia. That is not the case, of course.

As Harker speaks, horrifying truths surface. Meanwhile, Dracula reaches the nunnery where the interview is taking place. He reveals himself by emerging from the body of a wolf standing outside the gate. That is followed by high drama, which is best left undiscussed.

The first episode is brilliant, which won’t surprise those who are familiar with the track record of its creators. The second, Blood Vessel, doesn’t match up to its predecessor’s intensity. A whodunit of the old-fashioned kind, it takes us on a journey across an ocean on a ship.

People start disappearing from the ship. Soon, it is clear that one of the passengers is responsible for what is going on.

Although this episode has a smart twist and several well-written characters, too, it fails to surprise the viewer for the most part.

Still, it is watchable and makes one look forward to The Dark Compass, the third and final episode.

The time-travelling vampire with blood in his mind arrives in the United Kingdom in the present. The viewer expects that a descendant of Sister Agatha (also plays by Wells) shall meet the count, which Zoe (the descendant) does. Dracula finds himself surrounded by modern-day inventions such as light switches, helicopters, cars and computers. Here, the creators consume too much footage to show Dracula’s experience of modern times, an experiment in writing unlikely to impress everybody.

Famous characters like Lucy Westenra (Lydia West) and Quincey Morris (Phil Dunster) show up too. Lucy, a good-natured 19-year-old girl who receives proposals from three men on the same day in the Stoker novel, is depicted as a party girl, The redefining of Lucy’s character and also of some others, and Dracula’s use of a word like ‘downloading’ to explain the obvious, come across as desperate measures to portray modernity in a miniseries that is far more engaging when the plot is set in the past.

Although Dracula begins fabulously, the second and third episodes are less interesting than they might have been. That said, it is a first-rate miniseries that compels us to binge-watch it until the last sequence.